Joe Talbott <jose...@cstone.net> wrote: > On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 12:13:50PM +0300, Aggelos Economopoulos wrote: >> Johannes Hofmann wrote: >> > Matthew Dillon <dil...@apollo.backplane.com> wrote: >> >> Well, the DFly kernel has some very easy-to-use file access functions >> >> ala fp_open() and friends (see kern_checkpoint.c for a use case), so >> >> accessing the firmware file directly is easy enough. >> > >> > I thought about writing a generic firmware module using the new >> > FreeBSD API which reads firmware files from a certain directory >> > using fp_open(). >> > However, it seems that available firmware images need to be announced >> > with firmware_register() to make them available, so I would need some >> > sort of opendir() in kernel to scan the firmware directory and >> > register the available files with firmware_register(). >> >> ... and also to monitor the directory for changes :) >> >> > Alternatively we could adjust subr_firmware.c to trigger a file read >> > attempt in case the requested image has not yet been registered. >> >> Yah, in firmware_get(), it already handles the case where the module >> containing the firmware isn't loaded yet. You can add the directory >> search in loadimage() or better yet in a separate function (i.e. have >> loadimage() call load_image_module() and load_image_blob()). This makes >> much more sense IMO. >> > > I think this is a good idea with the one caveat that I don't fully > understand the security implications of arbitrarily loading blobs into > kernel memory. I was thinking of something along the lines of > /etc/firmware.conf that maps a short name as used by the FreeBSD API > to a filename in /etc/firmware.
I was thinking about a sysctl interface, like: kern.firmwares = "ath_bss:/boot/firmware/ath_bss.fw, ath_ibss:/boot/firmware/ath_ibss.fw" or so. In which case the kernel module would register the images under the provided short names. > > Johannes, feel free to implement this if you'd like. I am pretty busy > with real life at the moment. Same here :) Cheers, Johannes
